Sustainable Livelihoods
The cost of a dry season, counted twice
A €31,000 drying floor in the Sumarai Delta was built in the wrong place. The growers' union declined to use it, and then explained why in writing.
The Sumarai Delta Growers' Union asked for drying capacity in 2021. We agreed, costed it, and built a concrete drying floor at Kalisari in 2022 for €31,000. It has never been used.
The site is nine hundred metres from the union's store, on the wrong side of a channel that is crossable on foot for about seven months of the year. The drying season is not one of those seven months.
How we got there
The union's original proposal named a different site. During costing, our engineer identified a drainage problem at that site and proposed Kalisari, which was flatter, cheaper, and — from a set of drawings in Kathmandu — obviously better. The union's committee was consulted by email and agreed.
Nobody in that email chain was going to be carrying wet rice across a channel in March.
We said yes to the drawing. We had not walked it in the wet. Neither had they, and only one of us lives here.
The letter
What makes this worth publishing is what happened next. The union did not quietly stop using the floor. It wrote six pages setting out how the decision had been made, which of its own procedures had been skipped, and what it wanted changed in the partnership agreement.
- No site is confirmed without a physical walk-through, in the season the facility will be used.
- Consultation by email does not constitute committee agreement on a site decision.
- Any Fieldstone-proposed change to a union proposal must be recorded as a variation, with the reason, and signed.
- The union may halt construction at any point without financial consequence to itself.
All four are now in the partnership agreement, and the third and fourth have been written into every livelihoods agreement Fieldstone holds. The drying floor at the union's original site was completed in 2024, after a walk-through in March, and dried 41 tonnes in its first season.